Watermark
by SerendipitousWays
Summary: It was never just a song.
1. The Song of Storms

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The Song of Storms

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He never did think much of it: it was just a ditty he picked up off the windmill operator. It seemed to upset the man, so he did not try to play it until he was on the dry slopes outside the village. He soon regretted it as the resultant storm turned the hillside to a muddy sea and sent him skidding.

When he next played it he was hesitant, the notes soft and unimpassioned. His reward was a light and sunny drizzle over Lon and the end of a grass fire. He used it a few more times, each more confident, until he went back to regretfully fulfill a little destiny of his in Kakariko: they would have a hard decade with their only reliable well dried, and that was on his head.

He played the song one last time after laying the shadowed spirits in the temple to rest. Never again, he told the villagers, would their well lack for water.

The well filled; the Hero left. The storm passed with him.

More would follow.

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It seemed that no matter how hard the windmill drew, the water never had a chance to drain before the moon hazed over and another storm began to boil over the mountains. The ground was always thick with puddles and muck, but the people were glad, for after these hard years the hard cracked earth had yielded such a harvest as even the gaffers had never seen.

The next spring the well overflowed, at first in thin trickles between the close-hewn blocks, and then in gushes, rushing little rapids down the worn and dirty road to where it came to rest in the square. And still the waters came.

By summer's end it was a shallow pool stretching luxuriously though the heart of town. After five years it was a pond, bull rushes bullying their way through the sunken cobble steps, and the people were glad, for through Their Hero the Goddesses had blest them with such bounty. The verdant grasses and farms now slowly crawling up the mountain's backs had never been possible before, and still the rains came!

A decade more passed this way before the townsfolk cut a channel down to the plains before the little lake could burst its bounds and wash away the road. But the people were glad: as the bounty grew so too did Kakariko, as the recipients of such windfalls always do. The farms downstream cried out for water in their ditches, and so the waters came.

Fifty years again after the Hero gave the gift, his unnoticed apology, the road he had once climbed up into town was a rushing river. A river which crashed into the rice fields of the flood plains between the mountain's feet and the Great gorged River Hylia, the aqueduct hopelessly submerged, every time it rained.

Fifty years more and this was lake country, old villages below the warm, shallow water. Grain sailed up to the ever wealthy mountain city from the south, silks from the little Desert in the West, and ever rarer Zoran wares from the East. The fish were leaving, they said, they do not fare well in these ever changing lakes, nor do we, but their waters still rise.

Another twenty years would pass, and the Zora had faded into the deeps, unknown. A hundred more and their myth, too, would be gone with the water.

There came a day that the flocks of sky people could fly no more: the forced to land as the great shining seas were now too wide for their far flung journeying. Roosting sites had grown too few, with fewer every look, for still the waters came.

The rising tides sunk fields, shrunk farms: and so once great cities fell. A shadow fell across the land, near unnoticed save for how little was left for it to take. It was not the greatest danger when faced with whose paddy will wash away next, and what month the trawler's lines run empty. By the time the people knew enough to fear a traveler had flung the shadow into the sea, churning around what once were only mountains, now smaller day by day.

Still the waters came.

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	2. A Maiden's Prayer

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A Maiden's Prayer

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Her hero, it seemed, was the Hero of Legend, the one from the old tales of what she wished with all her heart was another land, distant, whose fields still sprawled for days. It was not, she knew.

She had met her Hero while touring the Land of Eld, the largest of her territories yet remaining, though she had taken no note of the dusty traveler. The water had climbed more than a full hand since her last visit to Midori and the tombs less than a year before, a far more worrisome thing. She went home to unsettling rumours of a shadowed man, and an attack on the temples.

What followed was madness, dark magic and monsters.

Cornered on the sea and under siege by the things she could not, would not name, she put her faith in a story. She devised a plan, sundered her greatest power to save it and sent out her most loyal servant to find them a saviour.

In truth, she had not expected success.

She met the eyes she had seen once across the fairgrounds months and moons ago, and she prayed, in that one hour when the gods should be listening if ever they had, but not for him. She had seen his eyes and his blade, and if ever she had had faith it was in this man, twice seen. No, it was not for him. Rather, she prayed for land: for her people to survive and endure as their means shrunk and shrunk and sunk. For her people she would even forsake the land she so loved, never set foot on it again so long as she lived, her children adrift on the sea, if only the damned rain would stop.

A light, soothing drizzle made itself known, after the Dark Prince fell, sweeping away the blood and the grime, though not his legacy, and not her promise. It was months and years, all uncomfortably, dreadfully wet, before the isles were set to rights. Her hero watched her for a time, tired and knowing through the storms, before setting out himself once his tests had ended, rather than risk a target to Ganon's followers.

She heard that a gale came up on the sea where he sailed, and he was not heard from on her shores again.

That unnatural storm was the last straw. Her ship was ready, had been ready, and the toll for waiting was already far too high. Her oath waited.

Hyrule was dead, but her people were not.

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	3. The Dreamless

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The Dreamless

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Even before he was told he had known that Koholint Island was not real because, perhaps paradoxically, of the absence of dreams, or even sleep. He only seemed to need it when it occurred to him, otherwise he might not have slept at all.

He broke, a little, then.

This tiny paradise, nightmares and all, the wonderful people, and this girl, his very own heroine, would have to vanish to send him back to the real and equally vanishing world.

He had faced the egg on the mountain, Marin at his side, the perfect girl dreamed up by a forgotten god. She does not seem real enough. She just seems real. And she is a God's creation: why can she not be?

It tainted all that came after, but it was a good dream.

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He might have woken once, at sea on his raft, the waves still choppy, but he had never heard of a scaled sea people, such as those who towed him along, so he doubted it.

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He woke in a bed below an unfamiliar ceiling, the face of an elderly woman by the name of Baleen above him.

It was a fairly large island he'd washed up on, with two mountains, one covered in scrub, the other woodland, and enough surrounding land to support the young town and the several tiny hamlets that had sprung up after the torrid rains of the last few years had forced them to higher ground.

The storms died off, finally, she said with a gruff sound, and the water's not rising quick enough to watch. Talk is it might have even stopped altogether! Her weathered skin crinkles around her wide yellow smile. It'd be about time too. The world is so much bigger than when I was a wee lass, but my world, and everyone else's, is just that much smaller. We hadn't much left to give.

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He is readily accepted among the islanders: a warrior is well useful against the fiends on the mountains, and he, well travelled, is better suited to gathering supplies in the forest of the fairies, as the climb is treacherous.

On a day perhaps a year later, a ship, wreathed in circling gulls, passes near and throws anchor. They trade for the day before continuing on at dawn, but they leave one person behind.

He sits with her that night in the sand where, speechless, he had thrown his arms around her. The gulls roost quietly in the trees behind them.

It reminds me of home, she says, red hair caught in the endless wind that carries away her song. No one said what it's called.

It hasn't been properly named, he admits, and we don't quite know what we're going to do yet. But it's a good place to start something. We're thinking Outset.

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_**A.N.** _The Hero didn't need to fail. Beware magic and the best intentions. (And what can a god's dream be but true?)


End file.
